Staple: gluten free veggie burgers

So, I’m not even going to attempt to do a thorough review of all of the gluten free veggie burgers out there (because there are only about three, and I only buy one). But I wanted to introduce a staple of my diet, as it’s probably going to be included in many of my recipes/reviews.

The problem with most vegetarian “meat” products is that they are loaded with wheat gluten. The titans Boca Burger and Gardenburger don’t have a single lousy product that I can eat (so long vegetarian “bacon” and “sausage”). Mostly the wheat gluten is used as a filler so the companies don’t have to put in as much expensive soy protein isolate.

That said, I still need my protein, and I don’t want to eat fish every day. So I eat a LOT of these veggie burgers from Franklin Farms:

I use these burgers in…oh…pretty much everything. They have 90 calories and 14 grams of protein! For any veggie protein source, that is a lot of bang for your buck. (More nutrition facts) Do I sound like a spokeswoman yet? No? Ok, how about this? These are all the things you can do with these magical discs:

Crumble them up and put them: in chili, on top of pizza, in soup, on top of a salad, stuffed in a pepper, mixed with rice or quinoa, in spaghetti sauce, in tacos, or anywhere you might use ground beef.

Eat them whole with mustard and cheese melted on top.

Or mush them into balls, fry em up in a pan, and make meatballs!

Franklin Farms also has two other varieties, but I wouldn’t recommend them (but to each her own, try if you’d like). You can find these in the refrigerated (not frozen) section of your grocery store.